


rebel just for kicks

by cosimamanning



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, THE CANON WE DESERVE, This Is My Self Indulgent Healing Process
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-02
Updated: 2017-07-02
Packaged: 2018-11-22 06:20:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11374356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosimamanning/pseuds/cosimamanning
Summary: Beth just wants to stop running.





	rebel just for kicks

Beth blinks.

Her mirror image blinks back.

They aren’t mirror images, not exactly, _thank god_ . Beth’s prepared for this, at least. She has a pink burner phone in her bag, and knows a girl with dreads and glasses and a girl with bangs who drives a fucking _minivan_ , and a girl across an ocean who comes with nothing but bad news, but the girl staring back at her is completely unaware. Beth’s hair is pulled up into a bun, strands of hair rapidly beginning to escape, and the other’s is wild, curly and untamed, a few blonde streaks racing through rebelliously, as if to say, _look at me, I’m different._

Beth doesn’t have time to deal with this.

“Usually this is the part where I get arrested.” She’s testing her, and Beth isn’t in the mood to be tested, not with the news Katja keeps giving her, not when it’s always bad news, not when Paul’s actions are becoming increasingly suspicious, not when she doesn’t know who she can trust and who she can’t.

She doesn’t have time to deal with this.

Her world has been flipped upside-down, and she doesn’t know left from right or up from down, and this girl, this unaware clone, will surely bring her nothing but more strife. She’s a _criminal_ , for christ’s sake. Beth’s found her on a whim, a call about a minor case of shoplifting. Art had offered to come with her, but Beth had brushed him off, she can handle one shoplifter.

Beth can’t bring a girl with her face into the station, can’t risk people forming some sort of connection between the two of them.

“I’ll let you off with a warning,” she says, and she knows the other girl wants anything other than this, wants an explanation, there are thousands of questions swimming in her eyes, but Beth has neither the time nor the patience to answer them.

 _It’s safer if you don’t know_ , she doesn’t tell her _, better if you don’t_.

“So what?” she challenges. “That’s it? You aren’t gonna say nothin’ bout the fact that we’re bloody identical?”

Beth ignores her, instead flashes her a smile that she’s perfected from years working on the force.

“Stay out of trouble.”

It’s not the last time she’ll see Sarah Manning.

* * *

 

Beth goes through the motions of her life pretending like she hasn’t met the copy of herself lost from the system. Katja’s calls come more frequently, with increased urgency, and Beth hears the rasp in her voice, knows she’s sick.

If Beth had it her way, they wouldn’t involve any of the other clones, but they’re being hunted, and need help. Cosima and Alison are the most logical options to bring to self-awareness, and obnoxious pink burner phones are distributed and they all struggle with the knowledge that they’re a part of something bigger while Beth tries to piece it all together on her own.

She’s falling apart.

Paul doesn’t care enough to notice, even as he sleeps next to her, always an arm’s length away. Once, Beth could pretend they were happy together, but now everything about them feels synthetic. She wonders if it’s caused by her suspicion, or if maybe he’s tiring of a subject who never seems to change. Beth wonders, desperately, if she gives him something to report back about, if maybe he’ll finally love her, genuinely love her, if for once there will be something _real_ shining out of the cold abyss of his eyes.

Maybe, in a world where she isn’t a clone, where she is the only version of her that exists, they could be happy. Beth likes to think that they could be happy. Likes to think that she’s capable of being enough for someone, in some variation of some universe.

She just wants to be enough.

But in this universe, she’s falling apart under the pressure of a destiny she never asks for, under the threats of a disease genetically programmed into her DNA and a religious cult set on eliminating her and everyone like her, and she doesn’t even know who created them, the people behind all the chaos and the sickness and the killing.

She gets a report for possession, and goes again to pick up Sarah Manning.

Beth sighs, and rubs at her eyes, because she knows that _she’s_ stubborn, her mother reminds her of it every time she returns home, reluctantly, for the holidays, telling her she’s too much like the ghost of her father, she just didn’t expect for there to be another version of herself equally as stubborn, perhaps even more so.

Sarah’s eyes are narrowed at her, calculating, observing, but wholly different from the clinical way Paul traces over her. She’s reserved, but oddly _hopeful_. As though Beth is an answer to something.

“Look,” Beth starts, “I have work, so if you could just stop―”

“Why won’t you arrest me?” Sarah interrupts. Beth’s looked at her records, she’s been arrested before, so she’s obviously not afraid of it.

Beth ignores the question.

“Just stay out of trouble, and try and stay away from me, alright? It’s better for both of us.” Sarah’s eyes narrow, and Beth knows that avoiding her questions will only make the situation worse for the both of them, but she’s too tired to bring herself to care.

It takes her until she gets back to the precinct to notice that her wallet is missing.

Beth doesn’t think much of it, makes quick work of changing her cards, until she walks into her apartment and Sarah is _there_ , lounging on her couch with a man who looks woefully uncomfortable, and her gun is out and pointing at the two of them on instinct before she can fully comprehend the situation.

“Bloody hell put that thing away!” he yells, and Sarah just waves jauntily. “You weren’t lying when you said your twin was a copper. Why couldn’t you’ve been lying.”

Sarah’s hair has been dyed and straightened and she looks like _Beth_ , and every time she meets one of the clones it’s a bit like looking in the mirror, but now it’s like _actually_ looking in the mirror.

“Hello, Beth,” Sarah greets, and she’s forgone her own accent to mimic Beth’s, and it’s scarily accurate and suddenly Beth starts to see the benefits of making Sarah self-aware, because Alison fancies herself an actress but none of them are as street-smart as Sarah is, as quick on their feet, as adaptable. She’s a survivor, Beth realizes, and she just wants answers.

“Ok, thats creepy, you can drop it, I’ll talk.”

“You better,” Sarah scowls, tone deepening as her own drawl returns, slapping a photo of Alison down on the table, and Beth realizes with a start that Sarah must have _followed_ her, and she’s vastly underestimated her usefulness.

And so Beth inducts another clone to clone club.

Sarah laughs, and she looks so much like Beth and it’s _weird_ , and her brother, Felix, gawks. Beth gets it, it’s insane. She ushers them out of her home before Paul gets back, because this is something she won’t be able to explain, with the promise that a pink burner phone will find its way to Sarah’s phone sooner rather than later, because Sarah still has so many questions, but Beth doesn’t have all the answers.

None of them do.

They’re running around like headless chickens, scared shitless.

Neolution is quite obviously up to something, as is Brightborn, and Beth can’t do this on her own. Katja contacted her because she’s a detective, because she’s supposed to be able to handle these sorts of things, but detectives always have a partner, and she’s drowning under the weight of it all.

She can’t be a protector to all of them, not when she can’t even protect herself.

Beth shoots a woman who calls her an _abomination_ , and she tells Art that it was an accident, blames it on the pills, on the madness that slowly threatens to overtake her. He places a phone in the woman’s hand, tells her that she saw _phone_ and reacted _gun_ and Beth lets herself be coached into lying.

The pills take the edge off, and when she snorts neat little lines of coke, she can stave off the aching loneliness for a little while, pretend that her mind isn’t a constant whirlwind. Some days she manages to smile at Paul and some days she fools herself into thinking that behind it all, there’s real emotion. Some days when she tells Art she’s fine, she can almost make herself believe it. Believe that she’s not drowning beneath copies of herself and unknown killers and the echoes of her gun shooting a civilian that isn’t really a civilian. Some days she can trick herself into think she isn’t falling apart, throwing back one more pill and basking in the gentle parlor of the moonlight, shaky arms gripping too tightly at a bathroom sink that is too cold and refusing to look in a mirror at a reflection that does not belong to only her, not anymore. Not ever.

Beth isn’t an actress, though. Never has been.

It doesn’t help that Sarah keeps getting herself caught up in trouble, and Beth finds her in her apartment with a stolen package of cocaine that she says is worth twenty grand. Even looking at it for a moment, she can tell that it isn’t, and Beth just sighs and rubs at her eyes, tiredly.

“Why do you keep doing this?” she demands. Cosima is a scientist and Beth is a detective and Alison is scarily efficient at whatever it is she puts her mind to. Beth has no doubt that Sarah has the potential to be _great_. “You could be doing something with your life.”

“Yeah, well people don’t see anythin ‘cept what they wanna see,” Sarah shrugs, “and I’m tryna make things right for my daughter.” Beth doesn’t think anything of it, in the moment, because Alison has a daughter, and a son, just files it away in the recesses of her mind for later. She has too many other things to worry about.

“I’m in this with you,” Sarah persists, “whether you like it or not.” Beth eyes her, up and down and sighs. “I can help.”

Sarah reminds her of herself, stubbornly insistent after the death of her father, even as her mother begged her, tears in her eyes, to do something safer, go down a different path. But Beth had always wanted to help, to nurture, to _save_. It’s in her nature, and, she supposes, it’s in Sarah’s as well, whether the other girl realizes it or not.

She is a mother, after all.

“Fine,” Beth decides, after a long while, “but ditch the cocaine, and stop purposefully getting arrested. I can’t show up at the precinct with a girl with my face and a criminal record. It’ll start raising too many questions.”

Beth has a million things to do and not enough time to do them, and an idea that sounds crazy, even to her.

“I need you to be me. Can you do that?”

Sarah startles, and then smiles, voice melding to Beth’s own tone.

“You’re damn right I can.”

Beth disappears for a few days on the track Evie Cho has set for her. She doesn’t trust her, but Beth isn’t sure she really trusts anyone at this point. Neolution is a front for something much bigger than she thinks even they know, an Aldous Leekie nothing more than a puppet.

Sarah manages to buy Beth the one thing she always seems to be lacking: time, but there are things not even the two of them can predict, working together.

Her pink burner phone rings, and Sarah is on the other end, frantic.

“ _Katja’s dead_ ,” is all she manages to get out of her, and she hears the wheels on Sarah’s car― _her car_ ―moving frantically, and then she’s coaching her on how to properly dispose of a body, and Beth’s blood runs cold, because of course the clone killer followed Katja from Europe.

Sarah’s a survivor, but Beth never expected her to have to survive this.

“ _She tried to kill me, too,”_ Sarah tells her, “ _I ducked, I ducked but she almost_ shot _me, Beth, bloody buggering fuck.”_ It doesn’t make any sense, because the killings have always been spaced out, methodically planned, and then Beth remembers the woman she killed, the fish branding on her neck, and realizes this killer is intent on revenge.

Sarah comes to the same conclusion later, when she comes face-to-face with a face that is hers but _not_ , screams that she isn’t Beth, and sticks rebar in her liver.

Beth hides, because the clone killer is a killer clone, and she’s no use to the others dead, and Sarah is risking her life for her, and Beth is still drowning in the weight of it all, but now she has Sarah, a lifeline, pulling her slowly out of the deep end, little by little.

Mika tucks her into corners that nobody thinks to look, nurses her back to health with iced tea and video games and stories of Niki, and for once, Beth lets herself rest, lets herself watch from the sidelines, helping Sarah silently in whatever ways she can.

Mika tugs quietly on the strings of her hoodies while Beth paces, restless, in one of her safehomes, always filled to the brim with nervous energy.

“Do you love her?” the question catches Beth off-guard, so much so that she stumbles in the middle of her pacing and Mika tugs on the drawstrings of her hoodies as if she’s worried she’s done something wrong, and hurries to clarify. “You worry about her like I used to worry about Niki.”

Beth doesn’t know if she’s capable of loving someone. There are parts of her that still feel irrevocably broken, and her synthetic relationship with Paul has been needlessly damaging to her psyche, and she’s doing better but there are still days where she’s drowning below the surface, unable to bring her head above water. She struggles to think of what would’ve become of her had she not gotten the call about shoplifting, not found herself face-to-face with Sarah when she did. If she hadn’t met her until later.

She thinks any later would have been too later.

“I don’t know,” she tells Mika, honestly. “How do you know?” Mika offers her a sad sort of smile, and she usually looks so young, but in that moment she looks so _weary_ , and Beth wants to reach out and hug her.

“Usually you don’t,” Mika answers, “not until it’s too late.” She speaks with the knowledge of someone who spent too long waiting, too long not knowing, someone who had an opportunity taken from them before she had a chance to explore it, and Beth’s heart breaks for her a little. She’s ashamed to admit that sometimes she judges Mika for hiding herself away behind masks and firewalls and a routine of running and playing games and drinking crystallized iced tea, but she’s holding herself together far better than Beth ever has.

Sarah goes and gets herself kidnapped by a bunch of Castors, and suddenly Beth understands what Mika means, about not knowing until it’s too late.

She hugs Mika and leaves, because she knows she can’t hide forever, and Cosima greets her brightly but Alison yells at her with a righteous fury, throwing around accusations of abandonment, because they needed her there, not behind a screen.

“I needed time,” Beth tries to explain, because she’d been breaking, and Alison softens and pulls her in for a tight hug, tears streaming down her cheeks, “I’m not leaving again.”

Sarah spent a lot of time pretending to be Beth, and then more time figuring out how to be Sarah, and Beth missed all of it. She meets Kira for the first time, and her heart automatically swells with love towards this child who could, genetically speaking, be hers.

Kira’s eyes seem to know her, studying her in the way that Sarah’s had, many times before. _Hopeful_.

She presses her little hand to Beth’s heart and brings Beth’s hand to her own, and Beth finds herself entranced if a little confused.

“We’re all connected,” Kira says, matter-of-factly, “you don’t have to be lonely.”

Beth is still a little bit broken but she’s healing, and Kira smiles at her and the aching hole in her chest fills, if only a little bit, and she sets off to work. To rescue Sarah, rescue Helena, find a cure, and find a way to punch Rachel Duncan in the face.

She doesn’t think it’ll be as satisfying as the look Susan Duncan gave her when she had her at gunpoint, but it will be enough.

She’ll find Sarah, and Helena, and then she will tell the others what she has figured out, about Brightborn and Neolution and the Duncans and Evie Cho, and together they will figure it out and they will find a cure and maybe this time Beth with be able to save the others _and_ herself.

And then she can heal.

* * *

 

Healing is a slow process.

Sarah has a long, jagged scar behind her ear that she doesn’t let Beth touch, for a very long time. There are nights where Beth has to coax her into the shower, stand there with her and hold her as she shakes, the water running cold, heat long gone, under the water. There are more, littered across her body, a map of reminders of the time Beth was away, and Beth traces them gently with her hands, silently promising to never be absent again.

They both wake up plagued by nightmares, and some nights aren’t able to sleep at all.

Those nights they curl up together on a bed that feels so much warmer than it ever felt with Paul, curling up in one another, gentling soaking in strength from the other. It’s easier, to heal when you have a partner.

Sarah’s a survivor, and she teaches Beth how to survive, little by little.

Kira folds her oragami butterflies and calls them angels, tells Beth that they remind her of Helena. Beth still has trouble matching the softening woman, twins cradled in her arms more often than not, with the woman that had caused so much pain, so much fear. She thinks, though, that if Sarah learned, she can learn, too.

Sarah arranges Beth arms _just so_ , because Beth doesn’t have the same maternal instinct she and Helena magically seem to possess, lowering precious, squirming cargo into her arms, and Helena smiles at her, hesitantly, as Beth coos at the baby grasping at her fingers. It takes an entire pudgy fist to wrap around one finger, and Beth marvels in this, in the beauty of _life_ , in creation, and when the next makes eye contact with Helena, she smiles back.

She and Sarah come together slowly, despite all of Mika’s annoyed huffing, because Beth is unsure. Sarah is burning fire, wreaking havoc wherever she goes, but if Sarah is a fire, Beth is a hurricane, and the thought of the two of them combining terrifies her, for a long time. She’s stubborn, like that, and Mika shakes her head and calls her stupid.

Sarah, thankfully, is just as hard-headed, and takes matters into her own hands, because Sarah is not one for waiting.

Beth’s still a detective and Sarah’s not an active criminal anymore―thank _god_ ―but on some days she steals Beth’s keys so she can’t leave the house, so she can bask in the glow of their togetherness just a little longer, the peace and quiet and healing nature of their _home_ . On these days, Beth laughs and calls Sarah a _dipshit_ , and Sarah shakes her head and asks herself how she ended up dating a _bloody copper_ , and neither of them say _I love you_ , but they don’t need to, because it’s in the way they look at one another, in the way Sarah touches Beth’s elbow softly, the way Beth tucks hair gently behind Sarah’s ear and Sarah doesn’t flinch away, in the way they just _are_.

Kira calls the rest of the clones _auntie_ , but she just smiles at Beth and calls her _Beth_ , and somehow it fills her with even more warmth instead of the isolation she’d expect it to, because Kira always knows her better than she thinks she even knows herself, Kira knows _all_ of them.

She goes to work and comes home to Sarah working with Kira on homework and Helena tending to her babies, who are strangely silent for infants―Beth was expecting more crying when Sarah pleaded, with wide eyes, if Helena could stay with them, because she’s her sister, and she’s tired of leaving her, and Beth can’t say no to those eyes, not when it’s _Sarah_.

Paul’s long gone, a ghost that only bothers her on the days she wonders, absently, why she wasn’t good enough. He’s quickly forgotten, though, with a quick glance at Sarah, who is constantly reminding her that she is _more_ than enough.

Sarah holds her gently, as though she is precious, something to be cherished. Not like she’s broken, but like she’s a treasure. In turn, Beth leans into Sarah, and, for once, lets herself be the one being protected.

It’s a nice change of pace.

One day, Kira finds some tapes of her running, and asks to go to the park with her. They bundle up, in coats, and Sarah kisses them both on their way out the door, and then they’re running, as fast as their feet will carry them.

For once, nothing is chasing them.  

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired loosely by "Feel It Still" by Portugal. The Man. Hope you enjoyed! Comments and kudos greatly appreciated! 
> 
> As always, you can prompt me on my tumblr, [here](danaryas.tumblr.com) and check out my other works [here](archiveofourown.org/users/sam_kom_trashkru/works). Thanks to Norma and Ray for convincing me this wasn't garbo!


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